Wiley Smith at the WhizBang Forge Company was a big winner. He saved his company gazillions by using CMMs to reduce manufacturing lead times and eliminate guillotine gages that cost up to $60,000 a pop.

When I saw him only a week ago he was higher than a kite, taking possession of his latest prize--the PointBlaster 7000 laser-scanning probe, complete with software and valued at nearly $100,000. No more sequential scanning for him. Today I was quite taken aback when I found he was down from the clouds and wallowing in the pits.

"What's the matter, Wiley?" I said. "You look like your mother just died."

"Worse," he said. "Manufacturing has outgrown its CMM room and will be taking over my lab on the second and third shifts to measure production blades. There's nothing I can do about it. And it's all my fault."

Wiley was fight as usual. A perfectionist of the first magnitude, Wiley lived by the motto: "Imprecision is the problem, and technology is the solution."

Until now, rigidity had seemed to be working well for him. First, he had convinced management to replace guillotine gages (that only measure a limited number of blade cross sections) with the unlimited capabilities of CMM scanning. Then he eliminated all holding fixtures by doing iterative alignments, even at the cost of sending one of his people down to do the setups because the manufacturing guys might crash a probe.

Soon, three CMMs were filling manufacturing's new air-conditioned room to capacity and data streamed in. To maintain metrological purity, Wily had manufacturing reference all parts and programs to bar codes (no keyboarding errors, please). And measurement results were piped back to the engineering lab, to a database to which Wiley and only a couple others had access.

Sophisticated analyses of all this pristine blade data were allowing manufacturing to streamline its tooling setups and meet even the most esoteric of Whiz Bang's customers' part certification requirements.

But all this success had proven to be Wiley's downfall, and he could talk only about "the disgusting thought of those ingrates overrunning his engineering lab." He was not going to let them get anywhere near the PointBlaster 7000.

I said, "Looks like what you have here is a failure to use all your CMM capacity. Let's go down to the manufacturing CMM room and have a look."

Over in manufacturing's inspection room, many football fields away, we observed three shiny DCC CMMs all chugging away, measuring free-standing turbine blades of various sizes.

"Maybe we should make fixtures for the new blades so the manufacturing guys can just drop them in, push a button, and measure," I said.

"We've got too many new blade models with short runs. We can't afford to make all those fixtures," he said.

"Why don't we train the measurement guys to do the iterative alignments? That should streamline your process," I responded.

"They're a bunch of probe 'crashers.' Too many of them. And they'd make a mess of our excellent GR&R results."

"How about another CMM?" I asked.

"Do you see how crowded it is in here? Where would we put it?" he shot back.

Standing before us was a polisher, who was waiting to take a blade off the CMM and bring it to his workstation. His head shifted from side to side as Wiley and I traded shots. And just over his shoulder, on the worktable of the adjacent CMM, I saw something I hadn't noticed before.

"Yo, what's that?" I shouted, pointing to a small blade whose root was snagged into an angle that had been created with pieces of steel plate and a C-clamp.

"Oh, that," said Wiley with a twinge of embarrassment. "Sometimes my assistant does something like that when he has to do a lot of the same iterative alignments. He calls it his 'close enough fixture,' because it holds the part and the CMM can automatically drive in close enough to the point where it starts the alignment sequence. He can just drop the part in and push a button and come right back to engineering."

"So why not do something like that and let the manufacturing guys drop the part in and push the button?" I said.

"It's too shaky. Wouldn't work with every part," Wiley replied.

"You could make sturdy ones. They wouldn't cost much."

"No way," said Wiley. We've got some very big blades that we measure all the time. So we'd be spending too much time taking 100 lb fixtures on and off the machine then putting on the fixtures for measuring the smaller blades. No efficiency there."

It was then that I noticed the polisher was still watching us and shaking his head with what I interpreted to be a look of disdain.

"I just love it when you technology gurus come down to manufacturing and discuss your philosophies. We're not talking microns here. We're talking close enough. Just drill some holes in the stupid big fixture so you can bolt the little one on top of it when you need it. Then we can drop in the part, and push the button and you people can get out of our way."

Wiley broke the silence: "That would work."

Soon all was well at the WhizBang Forge Company. Wiley was in his lab, on point cloud nine, churning mega-reams of data through his blade analysis package. Manufacturing was humming. The polisher hummed to himself as he worked.

Over his desk was a framed motto: "Sometimes precision is the problem, and 'close enough' is the solution."

Our Contest Winner

This column was based on a suggestion from our "Save the Sleuth Contest" winner Ray Prosek, Process Control Manager of TECT Corporation, Inc., Cleveland, OH. Ray insisted on our reminding readers that the events and people described in this column bear no resemblance to anything or anyone within a hundred miles of Cleveland. For his efforts, he wins a TESA digital tool set.

Stan Schnuerer of Tesma Engine Technologies' is our runner-up. We are awarding him a TESA digital micrometer.

EM Sleuth is sponsored by Wilcox Associates Inc., (www. pcdmis-ems.com) part of the Hexagon Metrology Group and makers of PC-DMIS measurement software. This month's contributors are Steve Logee, director of business development, Wilcox Associates, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and Joel Cassola, writer, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it